There was a considerable amount of activity in the data center/cloud switching fabric arena in 2011. That is expected to continue in 2012, along with real world implementations of the next-generation IT technologies.  A quick review of what went down in fabric switching in 2011: Early in the year, Juniper launched its much anticipated QFabric switches, borne of the multiyear Project Stratus effort. In the spring, Cisco expanded its own FabricPath strategy with enhancements that extend it end-to-end, from the server network interface card to the network core - among them, multihop Fibre Channel-over-Ethernet (FCoE) on its Nexus 7000 core data center switch.

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